Sinai Was a Footstool and the Shekhinah Has Worn Shoes Ever Since

There was a moment at Sinai when Israel could have been immortal. The midrash is precise about this. When Israel stood at the mountain and said "We will do and we will listen" (Exodus 24:7), the aura of the supernal divine presence was placed upon them. They were, in that moment, like celestial beings. The psalm would later put it directly: "I had said: You are divine, like celestial beings, all of you" (Psalms 82:6). The future tense was not yet future. The present was extraordinary.

Then they sinned with the Golden Calf. The divine presence lifted. The same psalm continued: "Indeed, you will die like man" (Psalms 82:7). The word for "changed" in the verse "the boldness of his face is changed" (Ecclesiastes 8:1) was read by the sages of Midrash Rabbah through a different root, meaning hated. The face that had shone with divine proximity became the face of one who had become an enemy of the Holy One. God, too, changed matters for them. What had been opened was closed. What had been elevated was lowered.

But something remained. The Shekhinah did not leave entirely. She changed her posture.

The Kabbalistic reading of the verse from the Song of Songs, "How beautiful are your steps in shoes" (Song of Songs 7:2), holds three meanings at once, and all three are connected to Sinai. The first: how beautiful are the steps of Israel when they fulfill the commandment of ritual pilgrimage, traveling three times a year to Jerusalem on the festivals of Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot. The word for steps, pe'amayikh, also means three times, which is why the midrash hears both pilgrimage and prayer in the same word. The second meaning: how beautiful are the steps of Israel when they ascend. The third meaning, and this is the one that changes everything, is the most ancient: the steps at Sinai. "His feet shall stand on that day" (Zechariah 14:4). The feet that will stand at the end of days are the same feet that stood at Sinai on the day of the giving of the Torah.

What does it mean that the Shekhinah wears shoes? The midrash on Sinai connects this to the moment when Israel, a particularly wise and understanding people (Deuteronomy 4:6), knew how to expound the Torah through forty-nine interpretations for ritual purity and a corresponding forty-nine for impurity. At Sinai, the divine presence came down in fire and the mountain trembled and the people stood at the foot of it, shoes on their feet, standing upright in the presence of holiness. The shoes matter. The standing matters. The place where the foot meets the earth matters.

The Kabbalistic texts read Israel in exile as the feet of the Shekhinah. She stands upon them. They are her ground in exile, the place where she rests when she cannot rest in the Temple, when the structure has been destroyed and the pilgrimage route has been closed and the gates that opened on Shabbat and New Moon no longer open onto anything recognizable as home. She stands upon Israel in exile because Israel stands in prayer. The standing prayer, the Amidah, is the central daily prayer of Jewish practice precisely because standing is the posture of Sinai. When Israel stands in prayer, they recreate the moment at the foot of the mountain, and the Shekhinah who stood above the mountain then stands upon the people now.

There is a consequence to not maintaining this. The Kabbalistic text is direct: those who do not stand up the Shekhinah with the divine name in their prayer or in their Torah practice cause her to cry out in the words of Lamentations: "The Lord has placed me in the hands of those against whom I cannot rise up" (Lamentations 1:14). The exile is not only a political or military condition. It is the Shekhinah's inability to stand because her feet, the people who should be her ground, have stopped standing. When they stop standing in prayer, she falls. When they stand, she rises.

Israel's forty-nine interpretations of purity and forty-nine of impurity, their capacity to reason Torah from all angles simultaneously, was the sign at Sinai that they were the people who could hold the divine presence in the world. The Golden Calf demonstrated that this capacity could be abandoned. The exile demonstrated what happens to a divine presence whose ground has given way beneath it. And the daily prayer of Israel, every morning and afternoon and evening, standing on their feet and reciting the Amidah, is the perpetual reconstruction of Sinai: the feet of the Shekhinah holding her up, the people standing so that the presence can stand, repeating in small the great moment when they said yes before they fully understood what they were agreeing to, and the mountain trembled, and everything that came after was shaped by that trembling.